* hairstyles may vary

Glorious Gastronomic Galactic Griddle

It started with a box. A long, slender, matte-black box. Looks didn’t matter, these people had a mission. As they wandered far and wide, the box began to grow things. Like barnacles on a whale, the box acquired shiny, geometric, phosphorescent bumps. Occasionally the workers would get around to scrubbing them off, but really they didn’t care so much. Feeding strangers was all that mattered.

One day a stranger came up to the box. “I was drawn to the shiny lightey spikey things,” the stranger said. “Oh!” said the workers, and invited the stranger in to eat. From that day on, the workers and the shiny lightey barnacley crystaley spiky things lived happily in a symbiotic relationship – the barnacles drawing people in for the restaurant and in return getting… whatever it is that barnacles need from a wandering restaurant that would otherwise just be a long black box.

Concept model for the outside design of the bus, made by Devon. The idea is we’ll take stainless steel and attach it to the bus with hinges so that it can lay flat while we’re driving around and then quickly turned into these pyramids when we get to playa. Lights will be permanently attached to the edges of the pyramids and the troughs between.

We moved away from previous ideas for a few reasons, but the most important right now is that we need something we can actually build in the time we have left to build it. I think this concept looks pretty neat and I think fabrication will be comparatively doable.

(The stainless is inspired by an enormous stack of stainless someone is selling on craigslist super cheap. We’ve been using it all over the kitchen and Nathan learned to weld it and we just really really like it as a material to work with. And it’s flipping gorgeous.)

Next step is to model it in the computer and work toward a buildable design. Exciting times!